[original material A&B 01'2020]
Is there a consciously shaped housing policy in Poland? Rather not, since the availability of housing continues to decline rather than increase. Something is beginning to happen on the subject, admittedly, but for now these are small steps. However, as Joanna Erbel, author of "Beyond Ownership. Toward a successful housing policy," an excerpt of which we publish below, every big step starts with a few smaller ones. Perhaps we are witnessing a change and we will be able to develop a successful housing policy, where other options besides buying an apartment on credit will emerge.
Chapter 3 The new is coming
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Local housing policies
A change in the approach to housing has occurred not only at the central level, but also at the local level. In 2016, local governments invested heavily in housing, creating new housing programs. This is not to say that previously there were no documents that talked about housing. Long-term programs for the management of the municipality's housing stock and accompanying resolutions regarding, among other things, the amount of rents did so. The obligation to create them is imposed on local governments by the Law on the Protection of Tenants' Rights. Multiannual housing programs determine in a horizon of no less than 5 years what the housing stock of a municipality will look like, that is, mainly the number of municipal and social housing units, and their condition. They say what the demand for housing is (how long the queue is), how many apartments should be renovated and how they should be managed. They also have to answer the question of how much it will cost to maintain municipal housing, where the local government will get the funds for this, and whether the municipality intends to sell municipal housing, and if so, how much and on what terms.
The law talks about housing quite broadly and emphasizes challenges rather than specific tools, but most multi-year programs have long been limited to only answering the question of how a municipality is doing in meeting housing needs identified with the balance of applications for social and municipal housing. Housing in the TBS stock may also have been included in the compilation, but not necessarily. No one expected municipalities to ask themselves what was going on in the market as a whole. Not their resource, not their tenants, not their problem. For years it seemed that it was the market that would respond to the housing problems of Polish women and men. Hence the understandably low public interest in what multi-year housing programs contain. For the average non-housing professional, there was nothing there worth noting. It was mainly the tenant movements and experts who were interested in them. This was more or less the case until 2016, that is, until the middle of the previous local government term. That's when it became increasingly common that there was a shortage of affordable rental housing and that local governments should not be all about housing.
Housing policies began to appear like mushrooms after the rain. Their scope and priorities depended on local circumstances and the extent to which ideas were accepted in the minds of politicians, office workers or the social side. These were not always interrelated processes. In Warsaw, for example, what to do about housing policy was discussed in subgroups. When I started working on Housing Policy - Housing2030 in November 2016, I was after a year of leading debates on housing as president of the Bliss Foundation, and I had a sense that we had some issues as a social side already thought through. I had a similar sense that the discussion had been going on for at least a year with a group of Warsaw councilors led by Mariusz Frankowski (and before that by Zofia Trębicka, who died in the summer of 2016). We worked with the Warsaw Office of Housing Policy, but never with each other. When we first met, except for the moment of determining who had dealt with the topic before, it turned out that we had a similar vision of change. We were convinced that for years too little attention had been paid to housing as an important area of urban policy. After many lost years, the decision was made to act, and act quickly. I was given six months to create a framework document. It was to be created as a result of debates and expert meetings.
It is difficult to say what was the main reason for this sudden acceleration and pressure to create housing programs. Was it the activity of the tenant movements? After all, they had been active for years. The violence associated with reprivatization? In Warsaw, in the fall of 2016, there was the threat of a recall referendum by Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz. The franking crisis? To this group, the local government could already do little to help. The entry into adulthood of a new generation that values freedom of choice and mobility more than property? In 2015 and 2016, housing did not particularly interest them. Discussions going on abroad? These, too, have been invoked for years. How about the migration experience and finding out firsthand that housing can be successfully rented? However, most migrants were still abroad and had no plans to return to Poland. One thing is certain, a change in consciousness began to take place in various cities.
Whatever the reason, local governments began to tailor housing programs to their own needs. But they also acted as if they were operating in a void in terms of existing strategic directions. Even if there were references to the National Housing Program in local documents, looking at their content, there is no direct result. Rather, it is the congeniality of ideas. The government program was cited out of formal necessity, but it doesn't look as if anyone was attentive to the spirit of the document. While the axis of the National Housing Program is accessible housing based on three pillars, this division is lost in the local documents. The same is true of other issues. This can also be seen in how weakly the Housing Plus program is present in local housing policies. And even if it is present (as in the case of the Warsaw document), there is a lack of real implementation and treatment of this program by the local government as one of the important elements of housing policy.
The lack of real connection between government and local government programs has two main sources. The first is political tension between the central and local levels. The second is simple ignorance. Local governments are adjusting to the new legal framework only when they have to, and are not treating Housing Plus as an opportunity for their housing policy. This is because housing, although it shouldn't, has a political aspect, and the lack of enthusiasm for the new solutions can be seen as a kind of grassroots official resistance to the new order. The proposed legislative tools are a foreign body, so it is necessary to defend against them, or at least to remain reserved towards them. The inclusion of the political aspect and the activation of related sympathies and antipathies also becomes a justification for not being open to new solutions and succumbing to intellectual laziness. The flow of knowledge and implementation of new solutions is hampered by a mixture of ignorance, arrogance and political preferences. The result is giving oneself the right to make easy judgments about the potential feasibility of projects one knows little more about than one can read in the pages of journalistic texts.
Local housing policies ignore the guidelines of the National Housing Program and seek their own solutions. Instead of working within a common framework, they create proprietary solutions that set local standards. There is much to observe. Even if each local government looks at housing a little differently, local housing programs propose a number of innovations, the bulk of which involve rental housing. Several cities are currently in the vanguard when it comes to a comprehensive approach to housing. The most interesting of these are Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and Wroclaw. Each of them answers the question a little differently: what should housing policy look like at the local government level? For whom to build? How to build? Where to get the money from? Also, each of these cities has had a watershed experience - usually a brutal history that became a breakthrough and a starting point for starting a discussion on housing.
Poznan, looking for answers on how to meet the housing needs of its residents, was the first city in Poland to rely on funds from a European Investment Bank (EIB) loan. The EIB loan allows the city to half-finance new housing projects aimed at middle-income earners. The EIB is reluctant to finance commercial projects. The remaining funds for the apartments come from a bond issue with PEKAO SA bank. Two companies are responsible for building these apartments: Poznański TBS and Zarząd Komunalnych Zasobów Lokalowych (ZKZL). The EIB can also finance up to 75 percent of the investment cost, but only for projects that promote sustainable solutions in housing that allow buildings to adapt to climate change, i.e., for example, reduce operating costs and energy consumption, increase biodiversity or implement comprehensive solutions related to the issue of water and waste management.
Also innovative is the very way ZKZL operates, having been transformed into a company in 2013. Prior to that, it was a municipal entity responsible for managing municipal resources. This formal move is also a local innovation, allowing the housing program to be implemented in a more flexible way. To date, other cities have not opted for similar measures. Although opponents claim that this swap was intended to privatize the resource and hide the city's debt, there are also advantages: the loans taken out by ZKZL are not a burden on the city budget as such. City companies also have more flexibility in decision-making and can thus act faster. As long as they have their priorities well set.
Another Poznań innovation was the creation in January 2018 of a Municipal Tenancy Office run by ZKZL, the idea of which is based on the concept of a Social Tenancy Agency (more on SANs in Chapter 6, Housing that levels the playing field). MBN rents apartments on the private market and sublets them to people in need, with communal rents. However, there are two conditions: first, the rent for the owner of the apartment must not exceed PLN 1,200 gross. Second, the square footage of the occupied apartment must comply with the Housing Allowance Law, that is, per the number of household members, it must not exceed 35 m² - for one person; 40 m² - for two people; 45 m² - for three people; 55 m² - for four people; and 65 m² - for five people. In addition, Poznań also runs programs for people at risk of exclusion, including seniors. And the "Apartment for a Graduate" program for graduates, which has been operating since 2015 and is run by Poznań TBS. Apartments under the programs can be rented to male and female university graduates working in Poznań, as long as they are under 36 years old. Contracts are signed for 10 years, and then there is a rotation. There are 143 apartments in the pool, including 77 one-room and 66 two-room apartments. To rent an apartment, one has to pay an own contribution (participation) of 30 percent of the construction cost. The starting rent was PLN 12.50 per square meter.
Gdansk has a liberal approach and focuses on helping the most vulnerable. The privatization of the municipal resource was also dictated by this - the city decided that it would not subsidize the maintenance of tenements housing people who do not require special support from the local government. This was happening at a time when there was no way to verify the contracts of municipal tenants. Hence the decision to act point-by-point and support only the most needy - those who need housing with social rent at any given time. Although it's a perspective that is ideologically distant to me - I believe that both the state and local governments should invest in below-market-price rental housing aimed at working people as well - it's hard to deny the innovative approach in creating housing for those at risk of exclusion, including immigrants and immigrant women. Gdansk has set its sights on creating housing programs aimed at helping disadvantaged people become fully independent. It is not the only city with such programs, but it is the only one that bases its housing policy on them. This does not mean that Gdansk does not have an offer for the middle class. The city's TBSs - Gdanska Towarzystwo Budownictwa Społeczne and TBS "Motława" - are also thriving there. Both efficiently use all possible sources of financing.
From a different logic than Gdańsk comes Warsaw's housing policy, which looks at housing much more broadly, setting ambitions to support a diversified housing system. This approach corresponds to Operational Objective 2.1 of Warsaw's #Warsaw2030 development strategy - "We have access to a wide range of housing." Warsaw Housing Policy - Housing2030 is aimed at all Varsovians: it talks not only about the stock of city housing, of which there are about 85,000, but also about such issues as community building, urban planning or providing information about the Warsaw rental market. This broad view and the attempt to show that interest in housing on the part of local government can go beyond the stock of urban housing was not at all obvious. When we started work on Housing2030, we were hesitant about whether the narrative should be centered around urban housing and the rest should be merely background. In practice, it was a question of whether to encapsulate the existing format, which is the Multi-Year Program..., and whether to look from a completely different perspective and show that a good housing policy covers all housing, the entire city - even if the local government has an impact on less than 10 percent of housing, because that is the percentage of the urban stock relative to the total. The second approach won out, not least because we were aware that without a broader view, the antagonism between municipal tenants and the rest can only get worse. It was from this perspective that we looked for clever solutions to indirectly influence the market.
All of the above cities, which can now serve as an example for others, previously experienced a series of omissions or decisions that outraged the public. Poznan was famous for its container housing development on Sredzka Street, where tenants with problems of difficulty paying rent or respecting domestic mirrors were sent. The container housing did not solve social problems, instead driving tenants into a spiral of debt due to the high cost of heating with electricity. The estate was liquidated in 2016. It was also in Poznań on Stolarska Street that the most brutal "tenement cleaners" operated (they were eventually sentenced in 2018 for harassing tenants to absolute imprisonment). Poznań is also a city where for years there was an anarchist movement centered around the Rozbrat skłot and the Wielkopolska Tenants Association. The same was true in Gdansk, where the tenant movement fought against the creation of container settlements. Gdansk is also a city where the problem of municipal resource management was solved by its mass privatization. The city has consistently pursued a free-market policy that housing assistance, if it is due, is only for the most vulnerable, not for working people. Gdansk was also the first city to dare to raise municipal rents to PLN 10/m². Years later, I conclude that it was right, because in the absence of income verification it is difficult to justify a situation in which rents do not even cover half the cost of maintaining buildings. Gdansk and Poznan have in common that in both cities the main debate was between the anarchist movement and the ultra-liberal official who stepped into the role of sheriff. In Poznan, it was a clash between the Wielkopolski Stowarzyszenie Lokatorów (Greater Poland Tenants' Association), affiliated with the Rozbrat sclot, and ZKZL director Jaroslaw Puck. In Gdansk, meanwhile, it was between representatives of the Anarchist Federation and Deputy Mayor Maciej Lisicki, responsible for housing. In turn, the story of the Poznan tenement on Stolarska Street resulted in the adoption of a law in 2015 that introduces criminal liability for landlord practices designed to force tenants to move out.
Warsaw, in turn, was plowed through by waves of evictions from turnaround buildings. My first emotional involvement in housing, without which this book would not exist, began with precisely one of these protests. In the early spring of 2012, I listened to the story of Ewa Andruszkiewicz, an activist with the Warsaw Tenants' Association, who, like many other families, was forced by the actions of the "cleaners" to leave her apartment and move to the suburban summer resort of Wilga. The WSL itself fought for tenants' rights for years, also demanding an explanation for the mysterious death of Jolanta Brzeska, whose burned body was found in March 2011 in the Kabaty Forest. The WSL stood shoulder to shoulder with the anarchist movement, especially the Syrena collective, demanding the start of a discussion on housing in Warsaw. The protests were also accompanied by the occupation of vacant buildings - of particular importance was the "scotching" by the Syrena collective of a reprivatized tenement at 30 Wilcza Street and a neighboring building at 6 Skorupki Street, a closed clinic owned by the city - the Przychodnia skloot was established there.
Tenant movements demanded the establishment of a Housing Roundtable, i.e. a Joint Team for Solving Social Problems in Housing, Reprivatization and Combating Homelessness and Exclusion, with the participation of city officials, councilors and activists. In addition to reprivatization, the topics of debate were to include revitalization, development of vacant lots, and preservation of cultural heritage, among others. The Housing Roundtable was established in the summer of 2012. However, it took several years for the authorities of individual cities to move from a defensive position ("it's not true that we don't have a housing policy") to comprehensive action. When we started working on the Housing2030 policy, the Housing Roundtable was no longer active. Anyway, the Warsaw Housing Policy - Housing2030 was ultimately not supported by the tenant movement, which protested against its adoption, accusing it of being antisocial - wrongly, in my opinion. One of the arguments was to include in the program the implementation of Housing Plus, which was categorized by the tenant movement as antisocial because it was commercial. The other, to uphold the decision to put the brakes on the buyout of apartments from the municipal stock. We found ourselves on two sides of the barricade.
Even if the new local government housing policies did not directly respond to the demands of the tenant movement, the activity of the social side was one of the important factors in raising the topic of housing to the top of the agenda. It is possible that each of these cities needed a strong jolt to take a more comprehensive look at the effects of overlooking housing as an important area of social policy, and to ask themselves with what tools and from what position is it best to act in order to have an effective impact on housing. In Gdansk, Poznan and Warsaw, the response to social tensions was to open up to new rental models, but this direction was not the only one possible.
Entering into new rental projects by local governments is not at all an obvious direction for housing policy development. Housing developed quite differently in Łódź and Wrocław. Łódź experienced its acceleration in the area of housing earlier than other cities. The context for these activities was the local revitalization program, an element of which was the Mia100 Tenements program (2011-2014), which aimed to renovate one hundred tenement houses, which are part of the historic buildings, and revitalize courtyards and public spaces. Unlike other cities, the next term (2014-2018) did not bring new systemic solutions in the area of housing. Although Łódź was one of those centers that recognized the potential of building apartments under the Mieszkanie Plus program.
The situation was completely different in Wroclaw, which, in accordance with the pro-market doctrine of the previous mayor, Rafal Dutkiewicz, relied on projects developed by the commercial market. The most progressive of these, and the most well-known, was the New Żerniki project, where the city authorities were involved in creating a master plan and pulling up the necessary infrastructure before selling the plots. The project was developed in preparation for the 2016 European Capital of Culture, but work began much earlier, in early 2014. The buildings that were constructed in the first stage of the project are all classic developer housing for sale. When asked about the lack of apartments for rent, Zbigniew Maciek, the originator of New Żerniki, usually answers that when they designed the development, there was no Housing Plus yet. The first rental housing project will be a senior building being built by Wroclaw TBS. More rental apartments are likely to appear in subsequent phases of the housing development. The successful close cooperation with the market at Nowe Żerniki was not a rarity, but a success that was reflected in the assumptions of the new housing policy for Wroclaw. Work on this document was launched in February 2019 in cooperation with the Wroclaw branch of the Polish Association of Developers.
Where do innovations come from?
Renting is slowly taking its toll on the Polish housing industry. If you look at the number of completed buildings, institutional leasing is still a marginal phenomenon. However, if you listen to the conversations, you can see the beginnings of a new trend. Business is talking about renting, lifestyle magazines are talking about it, politicians are talking about it. Social movements have also been talking about affordable renting for years. Something has moved and a new order is slowly emerging. A segment of institutional rental housing is emerging in Poland after many years, and the new narrative is being followed by pioneering developments. The first projects are precedents. They are exceptions to the rule, but they set a new framework for thinking and make abstract ideas that were distant until recently into something tangible. It is no longer only possible to refer to foreign trends, but also to domestic implementations. After all, if someone has made the decision to build for rent, it must make sense.
Also in the public debate there is more and more space to discuss housing - on the one hand thanks to the activity of local governments looking for new housing solutions, and on the other - by rising prices that make housing less and less available, so the topic becomes urgent. This makes us here and now at a moment when there is space to rethink housing. But what needs to happen for stable rentals to become a viable alternative to ownership housing? What can be done to achieve success in this dimension? These are questions worth asking ourselves, as renting in Poland is only in its infancy, let alone affordable renting. The market can always back away from further investment, just as politicians and politicians can shut down existing programs before we can assess their impact for good.
French sociologist Bruno Latour states that with innovative projects it is like romantic relationships between people. If it is to be successful, one must set dreams in motion, transcend fears and not necessarily talk about other people's intentions. Initially, there is only a glimpse of a vision of a shared relationship, which slowly comes to fruition. The process can be sped up with heated declarations, but they have little relevance to maintaining the relationship if the feeling fades and one person's emotions are transferred to another person or another vision of their future. The end of a relationship is rarely the result of a single violent event. Project work - as is the case with romantic relationships between people - falls apart not when it encounters strong external opposition, but at the level of small, practical settlements and daily practices, when there is a sense that it won't work out after all. The end of relationships is not the result of one big catastrophe, but is the sum of small, seemingly insignificant actions.
In the case of projects, they don't die when they cause social controversy - that's when their ambassadors feel obliged to defend them. As long as there are strong emotions, including negative ones, the project lives. The greatest danger comes when the tension subsides and the tedious daily routine sets in. What kills innovation is usually mid-level bureaucracy and routine office practices. When love - the power to transcend the here and now for the sake of the promise of a better future - begins to be lacking, routine creeps in to support conservative habits. Then it's easy to conclude that "since we've never done it," it's not likely to succeed. Conservatism is the greatest enemy of innovation, and if it begins to dominate, projects face "objective obstacles" arising from the "existing legal framework." It takes a really strong motivation to transcend the belief that because something "is difficult," it doesn't mean it "can't be done." The legal framework in which we operate is part of the social contract subject to renegotiation. There just has to be a strong enough reason.
In the case of both groundbreaking projects and successful relationships, if we have watched them develop from the very beginning, then we tend to claim that "it was clear from the beginning that they/they were made for each other," that it would work out and there would be a happy ending. We like to retrospectively show that the scenario that came true was the one that had to come true. Researchers and innovation scholars show that we are usually a hair's breadth away from a situation having a different course and direction. An example of this is when internal combustion cars, rather than electric cars, finally won the palm of primacy. From the field of mobility, a big surprise for investors was the failure of segway vehicles to become an alternative to other means of transportation, which in turn electric scooters managed to do. This is worth keeping in mind when evaluating the potential of new solutions.
The future will only to some extent be governed by the rules that guide the present. This is both good and bad news. Good, because many things that seem unrealistic to us are achievable. Bad, because there is no single good recipe for success. When we start something, it's hard to assess the realistic chances of success. Looking back, it's always easy to say that something could have been done better or differently. If we are in the here and now, we should focus on doing things to the best of our ability and not letting go.
Making changes on a larger scale is also hindered by the fact that project creation is a collective activity. It touches the dreams, desires, fears, and limitations of many people. The success of a project depends on how the power dynamics are arranged. More in this process of unwritten rules, individual ambitions, habits than rational justifications. Merely presenting logical arguments is not enough. Emotions and dreams are also needed. The success of implementing change is based on what Latour calls "shared misunderstanding." In practice, this means that we don't strive to have a single definition of the situation, we don't ask for detailed intentions, and we certainly don't account for them. We assume that there is nothing wrong with each party entering into cooperation for different reasons, sometimes even partially contradictory: the market wants to make money, social scientists want to save the world, politicians want to win elections, researchers want to patent a solution. If all these ambitions coalesce around a single project, there is a good chance of success. However, if in the face of difficulties and the passage of time (and the emergence of tedious everyday life) individuals see that they can pursue the same goals elsewhere and do it faster and more effectively, it is possible that they will abandon a particular project. And it's hard to resent them for this. This applies to all areas of life, not just housing. What distinguishes housing from many other areas are two things: first, the investment process takes several years (about five), so even if a decision is made to do something differently, implementation has to wait. Second, the new solutions will initially benefit a handful of people, even if it is a government housing program.
For the past few years, the source of innovation in the field of urban planning has been the free market and the focus on cost optimization and profit maximization. In this logic, there was no chance of developing rental housing. If you can sell apartments before the building is built, why spread the profit over years. Especially when there were no regulations that guaranteed investors that tenants and tenants would pay rent regularly. The rental market in Poland needed political decisions. There had to be a push from the government. Such as the Housing for Rent Fund or Mieszkanie Plus.
Karolina Tulkowska-Słyk in her book Modern Housing points out several phases that innovations go through. Describing progressive housing projects from the time of modernism to the present, she asks the question of their source. Speaking of the innovativeness of these projects, he starts from the classification developed by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. Wiener pointed to four stages, each of which is a necessary, though at the same time insufficient, cause of the next. The first is the intellectual stage, where an idea remains in the mind of a particular person or (less frequently) a group. The second is the technical stage, when there is a need for appropriate techniques or materials (at this stage it is possible to change the nature of the invention). The third is the social stage, during which cooperation and understanding is established between intellectual and technical workers. The last is the economic stage, when it becomes clear that the project is feasible and a method of financing and promoting the invention is established. When economic processes enter, the invention loses the odium of freshness and becomes something commonplace. The final stage, although associated with a certain routine, is of course the success of the project.
The transition from idea and prototype to a larger mass scale is an essential element when we talk about innovation in the field of housing. Projects that are interesting but unique or niche are of little use. Such a Warsaw example is Hermitage - Keret House (2012), by Jakub Szczęsny. It is located in a 152 centimeter gap between a post-war residential block at 22 Chlodna St. and a pre-war building at 74 Zelazna St. The installation has three levels inside and is designed as a residential structure, although it refers to the history of the Jewish ghetto. Keret's house serves as an artistic residence. However, it is possible to imagine such a scenario, in which Szczęsny's innovative approach could serve as one of the methods of densifying the center of the capital. This would have to be followed by appropriate legal changes and a new approach to housing, which is difficult but possible, as evidenced by the history of implementing various "speculative laws."
Innovation can come from a flash of genius, but as Tulkowska-Słyk shows, it also comes from an external impulse, a significant change in approach to the subject, i.e. from social sources. Also, the final stage does not exist without public participation. At the confirmation stage, a new concept "is verified over time, on the scale of dissemination, by the application of economic criteria and by the acceptance of users." - In the case of housing, this means that new homes are well lived in and are an attractive product on the real estate market. One of the elements Tulkowska-Słyk points out is also the question of trialability and gradual introduction, which is perhaps the most difficult in housing, because any design change is expensive, while urban planning is barely possible.
There is another stage of innovation that is rarely mentioned - the stage of storytelling. Reinterpreting events, fleshing out trends and creating new stories out of them, which can become an anchor for new phenomena. Trend stories and narratives organize reality. In the case of renting, such a narrative includes the fact that we are increasingly using instead of owning, as is the case with bicycles, scooters and cars. There is a huge difference between housing, which is the most expensive resource of many families, and any other property, but the change in attitude towards ownership as the only guarantor of security makes it possible to start thinking differently, more comprehensively, about housing as well. New ideas do not immediately seem rational to us. Usually we have to get used to them.
Parallel to the market, there are think tanks, social movements, lobbying organizations or simply groups of people or individuals who show an alternative approach. Some of them act in the name of ideas, some offer consulting services to the market, sometimes the boundary is fluid. However, it is through them that new knowledge and language is created. They collect data, verify hypotheses. This makes it so that when large market players, state or local governments decide it's time for a change, there are solutions ready for implementation. The question is, who should pay to work on innovations for a future that at any given moment seems like something distant? Companies can do it, the public sector and universities can do it.
Work on projects that potentially have a chance of being implemented begins well before they enter the mainstream. The more solidly the project is worked out before the moment of cooperation, the faster the result will be. An example of such large-scale implementation, which admittedly does not involve housing, is local government reform by Jerzy Regulski. In his autobiography, Regulski describes many years of work on the new system at a time when few but a handful of people were interested in it. Everything went into a drawer. Until the transformation of 1989, when the need arose. And that's when the ready-made, discussed ideas were taken out of that drawer and implemented. I like to remind myself of Regulski's reform story every time a project I'm working on loses its implementation potential and remains at the conceptual stage because circumstances change.
Whether implementing a new social model, technology, financing model or homeownership, it comes crashing down to who will do it first and whether that pioneer or pioneer will be followed by others. If you are a fan of model settlements understood as a housing project based on good urban planning, then you know how much for thinking about what can be done in Poland was brought by the project Nowe Żerniki in Wroclaw, whose originator was Zbigniew Maciek - this settlement is centered around a common space, a market square, and cars drive around the perimeter, avoiding the axis of the settlement. This simple solution completely changes the view of how to design. It's also the first estate to be built on the basis of a master plan developed by more than a dozen studios. New Żerniki does not solve all the problems of housing, but it is a step in the right direction.
In terms of technology, a breakthrough is the building at 4 Sprzeczna Street in Warsaw by the BBGK studio, which is being developed by prefabricated product manufacturer Budizol. This is a kind of rehabilitation of prefabrication. On top of that, the project is so beautiful and interesting that it has won a series of architectural awards. Budizol, by investing in Sprzeczna 4, shows us that living in a prefabricated building doesn't have to be a punishment, but can carry social prestige. It is possible to build efficiently and more cheaply, and to create things that are beautiful, fashionable and innovative. In the area of intergenerational construction, the first project was to be a tenement house at Stalowa 29 in Warsaw, but before the building was renovated, a similar project was carried out in Lodz, and the first of its kind will be built on Wólczańska Street. Nominally, the first coliving project is the 2015 Clipster in Gdansk, but it was not designed as a coliving project.
Innovation can solve social problems, but it can also be used to build market advantage. One such way is to open up to collaboration with artists and to consistently introduce art into housing estates. This is the direction Dom Development has taken, which builds the identity of the place in the process. For example, an installation by Jan Mioduszewski and Marta Paulat called "Soroban - the Counting Machine" has been erected in a Warsaw housing development on Cybernetyki Street. It refers to the eponymous Japanese abacus, the ASCII code, the holes of the perforated tape - a carrier of information from the time of the first computers - and the name of the street itself. There are more such pioneering projects. It's hard to answer the question of which strategy is better: engaging in local projects and creating prototypes or implementing programs at the system level. If you have ever wondered whether it is better to act locally or globally, you know the dilemma. Local interventions are limited in scale, but you have more control over them. Besides, they look innocuous, as if they were a flower for the sheepskin, not a butterfly whose movement of wings will set off a tsunami of change, so there is less resistance to their creation. On the other hand, acting at the central level is an opportunity for legislative change and intervention across the country. Scale is appealing, but it is also usually followed by compromises. Whatever strategy one adopts, it is useful to know one's objective. To know what to do, you need to know where you want to go.
Joanna ERBEL
illustrations: Michal Loba
